Re: MicroFocus Cobol and c-isam

> > Hello there list-members. > I am trying to use Micro-Focus Cobol to access files created by Informix-SE. > MF Cobol uses c-isam as the underlying file structure for it's indexed files. > There seems to be a problem if you try to REWRITE or DELETE a record, though > READing and WRITing is fine. I have c-isam ver. 4.00 and SE ver 4.00. > I guess the problem is because of the rowid column. If you bcheck the files > there is an primary unique index on that column (it does not occupy an space > though) and MF Cobol is not aware of it. > Has anyone out there tried this and made this work one way or the other? > Thanks in advance, > -- > Snorri Bergmann | Internet: snorri@strengur.is > Strengur Consulting Engineers | Bang: ...!uunet!strengur.is!snorri > Storhofdi 15 | Phone: +354 1 685130 > 112 Reykjavik Iceland | Telefax: +354 1 680628 > Snorri, Micro-Focus Cobol comes supplied with a version of C-ISAM 2.03. Because this version had a few bugs in it Micro-Focus changed the code to fix the bugs. In the meantime Informix did the same thing but slightly differently producing 2.04. As all C-ISAM versions can read older versions files you will not have a problem getting 4.00 to read Cobol files. But V4.00 will not be able to update an earlier version. To solve this problem at a previous company ve bought version 2.04 which at the time was still available. (Whether it is now must be in doubt). We found that most of the time it would read and update cobol files quite happily but sometimes it would hit one of the differences between 2.04 and 2.03+Micro-focus changes and blow up. By limiting what we did we got round these problems. Today when you buy COBOL-2 from Micro-Focus they still provide their version of 2.03 but they have also provided a way in which you can replace this with a different ISAM package. This works as long as the other package meets the interface requirements. C-ISAM v4.00 should be no problem as the interface requirements are based on C-ISAM. This way you should be able to get COBOL to look at 4.00 files rather than 4.00 to update COBOL files. Hope this helps. Cheers, Jim -------------------------------------------------------------------- Name: Jim Gordon Internet: jgordon@ssf-sys.DHL.COM Company: DHL Systems Inc Phone: (415) 358-5911 Address: 1700 S. Amphlett Blvd. Fax: (415) 571-6429 San Mateo, CA 94402 --------------------------------------------------------------------